Column: Remembering Saginaw's Waldenbooks, defunct Kroger

As the year comes to a close, many media will pay homage to the people who have died since the last Times Square ball dropped.

News of the Waldenbooks closure planned at Prime Outlets at Birch Run and the Saginaw Township’s Waldenbooks, though, is a reminder of the places no longer with us since this time last year.

Waldenbooks, due to sell its last novel next month, isn’t the only community linchpin to disappear in the last 12 months. Don’t forget Saginaw’s Kroger store, on State, which locked its doors Dec. 9, 2008.

While neither loss deserves a funeral, each certainly is owed an ode of some sort. As a 30-year patron of both locales, I’m not ashamed to say the two stores hold some sentimental value and leave behind the same distinct Saginaw feel that oldergenerations might attach to one-time mainstays such as the Ippel building and Jacobson’s.

Among the newly fallen, the now-defunct Kroger has the deepest history for me.

I remember, as a child, spending Sunday mornings with my legs hanging out the top compartments of shopping carts as my dad threw the week’s groceries in. Somehow the wheels spun faster when we were moving down the candy aisle, making those M&M and SweeTart teases zip by in a blur. A few growth spurts later, I was allowed to control the pushcarts, which often got treated like skateboards sailing down the rows.

The checkout lines were much longer than at the store’s $4 million replacement in Green Acres Plaza. While the convenience of efficient service appeases the shopping impatient, the old store’s near-idle movement forced customers to converse with fellow consumers. And, for the stubbornly shy, there were those guilty-pleasure tabloids stacked next to the conveyer belts.

I preferred anything featuring Bat Boy.

Up until the 1990s, that old Kroger — also known as Kessel’s, for a good chunk — housed a neat little concession stand near the entrance that kept needy kids OK with spending an hour or more away from cartoons. No Coney Island or A&W store could match those 25-cent Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Dixie cups filled with fizzy, fresh-from-the-faucet Coca-Cola.

The new Kroger has its appeal, but it’s not Saginaw. At least not yet. It’s Walmart — a big-business blasphemy too generic in design and feel nationwide to belong to any one community — minus the flat-screen sales.

Then there’s Waldenbooks, a staple at the mall since the shopping center opened in 1972.

I became familiar with the store in the 1990s, when most of my teenage peers were checking each other out in the spankin’ new food court. The best-sellers rack out front had more appeal to me than the typical adolescent cat-and-mouse play under way somewhere between Panda Express and McDonald’s.

These days, a good story — whether it’s a sprawling novel or a magazine piece — is only a keyboard click away. But for decades in Saginaw, Waldenbooks was the place to go for those who preferred to hold their literature and couldn’t stand the library police.

One could spend hours at a time in Waldenbooks sifting through the periodicals and searching book aisles for a good, rare read. I was an amateur at spotting the obscure and often ended up buying the obvious Stephen King, Michael Crichton or James Patterson.

Having a bookstore in the shopping center also provided an odd sense of intellectual security for some. Mall rats of all ages knew that, no matter how deep they got sucked into the commercialized blasé of fast-food clothing retail and novelty sale, at least one store might rescue their IQ levels from a Fashion Square plummet.

Not for much longer. Now the book sales market in this region belongs almost exclusively to Barnes & Noble. That’s not such a horrible compromise, but it won’t be quite the same looking at that big empty space in the mall.

Then again, nothing is ever the same. The best we can hope for in the new year is the next familiar thing ... and that Walmart won’t render it useless.